“Oh!” said Hero, digesting this. She raised her eyes to his face and heaved a tiny sigh. “I am not a prude, Gil.”
“No,” agreed Mr Ringwood feelingly.
“And I am not going to be missish, for my cousin says there is nothing gentlemen dislike more. But I cannot help wishing — a very little — that Sherry had not an opera dancer either.”
Mr Ringwood made an inarticulate sound in his throat and took his embarrassingly outspoken charge back to her box. Here they were joined in a few moments by the Viscount and Mrs Hoby, and as the curtain went up almost immediately, there was no opportunity for any further confidences.
The whole party left the Opera House in the Sheringhams’ barouche, Mrs Hoby maintaining a sprightly flow of small talk until she was set down at her own door. Mr Ringwood went on to Half Moon Street with the Sheringhams, and cravenly refusing an invitation to enter the house with them, parted from them on the doorstep and walked the remainder of the way to his lodging. It went to his heart to ignore the pleading tug Hero gave his sleeve, but he was of the decided opinion that he would make a very uncomfortable third in the quarrel that was obviously brewing.
The door being opened to the returning couple by the butler, Hero, after one surreptitious glance at his lordship’s ominous face, said: “I am so tired! I think I will go straight up to my room.”
“Send your abigail to bed!” returned his lordship. “I want a word with you in private.”
The agitating prospect of a word alone with a husband who was looking like a thundercloud made Hero feel quite sick with apprehension. She would have liked to have kept the abigail at her side, but as it seemed more than probable that Sherry would order the woman out of the room if he found her there when he came up, she dared not do it.
He entered without ceremony not five minutes after the door had closed behind the abigail. Hero had just locked the pearl set away in her jewel case, and without these gauds she looked much younger, in fact, so like the tiresome little girl the Viscount had bullied in his schooldays, that he straightaway forgot the dignified speech he had been preparing all the way home from the Opera House, and strode across the room to her, seized her by the shoulders, and shook her unmercifully. “You abominable little wretch, how dared you?” he demanded wrathfully. “Didn’t I tell you — didn’t I warn you to guard that damned, indiscreet tongue of yours? ‘ Oh, Sherry, is that your opera dancer? ’No, it was not my opera dancer, and you may take that with my compliments!”
Tears started to Hero’s eyes. Released, she pressed a hand to one tingling cheek, and quavered: “Oh, Sherry, don’t! I didn’t mean to say it! I forgot we were not alone!”